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Sarah Palin, once the mayor of a town smaller than a Sonic Drive-In parking lot, once the vice-presidential pick who thought “foreign policy experience” meant waving at Russia across the Bering Strait, decided she had a new calling: taking down the First Amendment.
After all, if the media could say things she didn’t like without consequences, was it really even freedom?
Palin’s grievance tour made a pit stop at The New York Times, where she sued over an editorial that briefly (and mistakenly) linked her PAC’s violent imagery to a mass shooting. The Times corrected it almost immediately, but Palin smelled blood—or at least the opportunity for a Fox News segment and a GoFundMe page.
The problem, as every first-year law student and sentient houseplant knows, is that in America, public figures have to meet the “actual malice” standard to win defamation suits. Translation: you can’t just be offended and call it a day. You have to prove they lied on purpose. But Palin’s legal strategy was forged in the same workshop as her foreign policy expertise: loud, wrong, and wearing camo.
At trial, things went about as well as a moose hunt with no bullets. The judge all but announced that Palin’s case was legally dead before the jury even ruled. (In fairness, it had been legally dead before she filed it.)
The jury, no doubt wishing they were anywhere else—jury duty, the DMV, even another Sarah Palin reality show—dutifully confirmed what was obvious: Sarah lost. Again.
But if there’s one thing about Sarah Palin, it’s that she’s the human embodiment of that raccoon scratching at your garbage cans at 2 a.m.: loud, wrong, and utterly unbothered by failure.
She appealed. She kept filing. She kept losing. Her lawyers kept sending invoices.
Each defeat brought another self-righteous speech about “lamestream media bias,” as if the Constitution itself was some elitist plot to keep strong, poorly informed pioneers like her from winning easy money off newspaper corrections.
At this point, Sarah Palin’s understanding of defamation law is so bad that it deserves its own warning label.
Caution: exposure may cause chronic whining, wallet depletion, and hallucinations of constitutional violations.
